About

Serious Cat is a popular image macro featuring a picture of a white cat …looking srsly serious. The image is typically accompanied by a caption that reads:

I Are Serious Cat. This is Serious Thread.

Origin

The original picture of the cat was posted in early 2005 on a Korean lulz community Humor University[1]. Paired with a picture of a celebrity DJ/rapper Jae Young[2], the XY comparative macro revealed a bizarre resemblance between the two. Instantly captivated by the cat’s seriousness and celebrity likeness, Humor University netizens dubbed it Jae-Young Cat[3] and spread the image across the Korean web, including DCInside[4], RuliWeb[5] and Today Humor[6]. Later that year, Jae Young Cat and one of its derivative images[7] were featured as the most reblogged images on Naver.com, a portal search engine site.

Spread

Although the details of its travel routes remain unclear, the popular lolcat made its way over to 4chan and YTMND in August 2006, spawning a series of image macros and derivatives that became known as Serious Cat. The image macro featuring the caption “I are serious cat. This is serious thread” gradually disseminated across various LOLcat blogs, media aggregators and social networking sites including ICHC[9], Digg[10] and Facebook[11]. There is also a single serving site called SeriousCat.com[12] that was launched on November 5th, 2007.

According to the Urban Dictionary[8] entry submitted on September 17th, 2009, the macro was also popularized on Internet Movie Database[13] by user Timmys_DownTheBloodyWell:

A very fucking serious white cat popularized by imdb.com user Timmys_DownTheBloodyWell. He is Emperor and Supreme overlord of a board called “The Sandbox” as well as President of the Anti-squirrel coalition.

Search Interest

In addition, Google Analytics searches for “Serious Cat” coincide with the rise in demand of Caturday; both are given a boost during the peak of Icanhascheezburger’s LOLcat queries.